First Canadian National Linux InstallFest

Saturday, September 26, 1998 was a big
day for the Linux community in Canada—the First Canadian National
Linux InstallFest was held.

The InstallFest was organized on a national level by CLUE
(Canadian Linux Users' Exchange) to provide experienced help to
those interested in installing Linux on their computers. CLUE is an
organization that supports the development of local Linux User
Groups and also co-ordinates events, corporate sponsorships and
publicity at a national level. CLUE hopes that by enhancing
association and communication amongst Linux developers, users,
suppliers and the general public, it can increase the use and
appreciation of Linux within Canada.

Highlights

A dozen different events were held by Linux User Groups
across Canada, from Halifax to Victoria, all taking place on the
same day.

The Montréal event, at its peak, had as
many as 100 people in the room at once and by all accounts had 200
to 250 people stop by. They did 40 installs, only 20 of which were
from preregistrations. They even got the crew of the local TV show
Branch to stop by for an interview, due to air
in November. Also worthy of mention is that they had guru Jacques
Gelinas, author of the LinuxConf software, answering
questions.

Two InstallFests were held in the
Toronto area: one at Seneca College and the
other at the University of Toronto Bookstore. The Seneca College
event had a late start due to a power outage, but more than made up
for it later as the unofficial count of installs was about 100.
They even rolled out their Beowulf class Linux cluster for the
masses to look at and see how a few “small” Linux boxes can be
turned into a “supercomputer”.

The Manitoba UNIX Users Group (MUUG)
held their InstallFest at the University of Manitoba as a two-day
event beginning on Friday. As this was their first InstallFest,
they deliberately kept it small and aimed it mostly at the faculty
and students of the U of M. About 140 people attended, with more
than half purchasing a Linux CD, and MUUG did 19 successful
installs. Attendance was greater than expected, probably due to the
national news coverage the event received. At least one person came
in who said he heard about the InstallFest from a segment on CTV
News-1, a national news network.

The MUUG web site made mention of one more interesting story
from the event. One attendee brought in a system which became known
as “Franken-puter”! It appeared to be two separate cases tossed
together with all sorts of spare parts the owner scrounged up,
connected with a piece of coax Ethernet cable. He spent as much
time swapping parts and reconfiguring on the fly as he did
installing Linux. He apparently showed up at the start of the event
on Friday and didn't finish until midafternoon on Saturday. Even
after all that, he still hung around afterwards to help others with
their installs.

The Ottawa InstallFest was hosted by the
Ottawa Carleton Linux Users Group (OCLUG). While almost all the
other events were held in a more academic setting of local colleges
and universities, OCLUG had their event sponsored by NovoClub, a
local retail store. NovoClub is located in a shopping mall and
managed to get an empty storefront for OCLUG to use. They also
arranged for display kiosks by several companies to be set up in
the mall. There were training companies, a local ISP and most
notably Corel Computer displaying their NetWinder. Of course,
NovoClub offered specials on their very large selection of Linux
products. The whole event was more like a mini-tradeshow than a
typical InstallFest.

The unofficial count at the installation storefront was 250
people. This count included those who came to have Linux installed
on their machines, members of the press and “just curious” folk
who stopped to ask questions while wandering around in the
mall.

OCLUG chose not to have people preregister; they decided to
just let anyone come and register the day of the event. It was
supposed to start at 10 AM and go until 5 PM. However, a line had
formed by 9 AM when the mall opened and OCLUG soon ended up with a
backlog of machines waiting for Linux installation. At 3 PM, they
were two hours behind and had to start turning people away. By the
time it was over, they had installed Linux on 50 to 60 machines and
still had ten they could not finish.

Not all events were as popular as the ones listed above. The
New Brunswick Linux Users Group had only ten
people attend, with four successful installs. They were a bit
disappointed with the low turnout. However, it was also homecoming
week at Mount Alison University in town and a football game was in
full swing at the same time as the InstallFest. They are in the
process of designing a tutorial for their new users and anyone else
who is interested. The Fredericton InstallFest
was a little larger, with thirty attendees and ten
installations.

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